Dean Baquet

An error-laden story that faulted federal officials for failing to properly screen San Bernardino shooter Tashfeen Malik has revealed "a system failure" at The New York Times, Executive Editor Dean Baquet said Friday in an interview with Public Editor Margaret Sullivan. The story, which was published on the front page of Sunday's edition of The New York Times, erroneously … Read More

Hey, hi. Here are 10 media stories. Lawsuit over Newsweek's Bitcoin story? The man who Newsweek's Leah McGrath Goodman identified as the founder of Bitcoin is raising money on a website to sue the magazine, claiming he was "targeted and victimized by a reckless news organization." Dorian Nakamoto has been unemployed for 10 years, the site says. "Donations, … Read More

I am going to begin this essay on leadership with an extended baseball analogy. I realize that this will make my argument sound “gendered,” and not in a good way, but I’ll take my chances. There are a lot of good baseball managers out there, and one of them is Joe Maddon, skipper of our local team the Tampa Bay … Read More

Never do media reporters look more like the parabular blind men describing an elephant than when describing a complicated management transaction at an operation as large as The New York Times, which changed top editors Wednesday. Different sources offer different frames, sometimes for the same events, and even the people who know best what happened may offer varnished accounts. This post aims to offer a wide-angle view of the elephant's contours.
The New York Times building, viewed from across the street Wednesday. (AP Photo)
Why Jill Abramson got fired
• Wednesday afternoon Ken Auletta wrote in The New Yorker that Abramson recently "discovered that her pay and her pension benefits as both executive editor and, before that, as managing editor were considerably less than the pay and pension benefits of Bill Keller, the male editor whom she replaced in both jobs."
“She confronted the top brass,” one close associate said, and this may have fed into the management’s narrative that she was “pushy,” a characterization that, for many, has an inescapably gendered aspect.
Abramson had also "clashed" with Times Co. CEO Mark Thompson, Auletta reported, and had planned to hire someone to oversee the paper's digital operation without consulting Baquet, who the paper passed over in 2011 for the top spot. Still, he and Abramson had a fairly good working relationship, Auletta and others report, though Auletta adds: "I was told, however, that, at a recent dinner with [Publisher Arthur] Sulzberger [Jr.], Baquet said he found her hard to work with."
• Abramson wanted The Guardian's Janine Gibson in that role, David Carr and Ravi Somaiya wrote in The New York Times. The prospect "angered" Baquet, they report, which "escalated the conflict between them and rose to the attention of Mr. Sulzberger." Read More